At the end of 2015, during a release of the Italian government’s new website, the government also presented a new project called Design.italia.it. This project covered design guidelines for the Governance Web Services, thereafter called Team for Digital Transformation. The scope of this project was quite ambitious: design and share a set of basic components to build innovative digital products for public services, and offer to the people the same and coherent user experience in all governance Italian websites and products. Moreover, the project included a very rich set of plugins and components for making life easier for Italy’s digital visitors and for smoothing the steps for critical bureaucracy paths. Some digital projects are digital signatures, SSO logins for all local, regional, and national governance websites, and digital identity cards.

OPEN VISION

The Digital Team’s ongoing mission is sharing an open source vision to improve government services, simplifying them for the sake of Italy’s citizens. To do this, it is important to include those citizens in the design process.

"The goal of the community is to focus on the needs of citizens, including their point of view in the change, to stimulate them to approach the digital tools and to link with the changes introduced by digital transformation plan of the country."

Design.italia.it uses several "Design Kits" (italian) that contain guidelines, checklists, and graphics solutions components and are grouped into practical sections called DO, UNDERSTAND, and CONCEIVE. Below we will present three of the kits, specifically the SEO, WEB ANALYTICS, and DESIGN WORKSHOP kits. These kits represent the first three steps for starting the process of user-centered design suggested by Team Digitale.

SEO [DO]

Search Engine Optimization is the analysis of search terms entered into a search engine, and is a key component in learning about what users need. This type of analysis helps to design content so that it is easy to find in these contexts.

WEB ANALYTICS [UNDERSTAND]

The Web Analytics kit has guidelines about generating a basic web analytics report, with the aim to share the data with a team or with other stakeholders.

This kit is useful for learning how to produce custom dynamic dashboards on the two most used web analytics platforms: Google Analytics and Piwik. For both platforms, the kit offers instructions on creating a personalized dashboard and an example of a default dashboard, which can be imported or inspired.

CO-DESIGN WORKSHOP [CONCEIVE]

The Co-design Workshop kit contains some examples of agendas to facilitate co-design sessions, and templates for worksheets to be used during the activity. The following materials are to be considered only as a starting point to be adapted according to the context and the specific purpose of the cases in which they are used. and customize according to the objectives and the specific area of intervention: